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Money, connections and passion make a potent mix in "Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict," a straight-ahead documentary on the arts patron and her many appetites.
Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland employs a wealth of interviews with art critics and acquaintances, including performance artist Marina Abramovic and actor Robert De Niro (whose parents showed work in Guggenheim's gallery), which trace Guggenheim's tragedy-filled life and how she used her inherited money to foster relationships with artists in Paris before World War II, in New York during the war and in Venice after it.
Vreeland makes a big deal about a set of unearthed audio interviews, with Guggenheim taking questions from biographer Jacqueline B. Weld just before Guggenheim's death in 1979, but there's not much revealing in her answers other than the litany of famous artists — including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Samuel Beckett — with whom she had love affairs.
Vreeland dutifully gives the laundry list of artists Guggenheim discovered, most notably Jackson Pollock, but the resulting film feels like a well-illustrated Wikipedia entry.
'Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict'
Opens Friday, Dec. 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; not rated, but probably PG-13 for art featuring nudes, and some language; 96 minutes.